ietf-nntp draft-ietf-nntpext-base-17

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> This is LIST ACTIVE.TIMES, right? In which case the specification
> doesn't say that it can omit newsgroups arbitrarily.

In practice, LIST ACTIVE.TIMES omits groups arbitrarily.  (In particular,
it only holds groups created since the server was first configured, and
the initial import of an active file is not reflected on the server.
That's generally what you want, since otherwise the first client that
connected would be presented with a giant list of new newsgroups.)

> Is this an issue? The current specification - at least as I would read
> it - is that LIST ACTIVE, LIST ACTIVE.TIMES, and LIST NEWSGROUPS should
> produce the same list of groups given the same wildmat or absence
> thereof.

I don't think we should indicate that this is the case.  While it might be
nice if all servers were configured that way (except for the ACTIVE.TIMES
issue above), in practice a lot of servers create groups without adding a
description so groups are randomly missing from LIST NEWSGROUPS.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>